It's funny how police incidents of larceny fall when they stop responding to calls and refuse to take incident reports.

When people are shoplifting several times a day from your store and SFPD doesn’t even show up, how many of those incidents are captured in the data?

I had my car broken into twice in SF and never reported it because, nobody cares?

If the reports are being generated in sufficient detail to inform Target's decision making, they are almost certainly being reported to the police. Because I'm sure Target CCs the police on reports that are for internal consumption (they certainly claim to in the article.)

All of them, because you report it to the police every time even if they don't show up, because otherwise youwill be blamed for the missing stock.

Do you do 8 reports a day? I doubt it. Probably one report that says “multiple shoplifting episodes” and SFPD counts it as one incident.

The data capture is terrible.

Yes, and they probably just track inventory by listing that each shelf contains "several items" once per day, like a corner store in the 1960s.

Probably not because there is no value in having employees write meaningless reports and pay them to do it. Seattle PD straight up won’t show up, no matter how much you try, feel free to submit the online I’ve been robbed form if you need it for insurance

I see you haven't come across the internal processes at large retail operations. They straight up don't care if SPD shows up, because this is about reducing loss from employee theft.

Reporting is actually less common than you think for property crimes. None of my neighbors or friends report package thefts, car breakins, etc. For one the police can take hours to respond if they show up at all, especially in cities that are very understaffed like Seattle. Another angle is that insurance claims are simply not worth it because deductibles are high enough and in the end you’ll face higher premiums. And if the police are never going to investigate or arrest someone (or if the city attorneys just release the criminal), what’s the point? For businesses they have similar considerations of the tradeoffs. Here’s an example of a Seattle area grocery chain that had stopped reporting crimes: https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...

Just because it's down doesn't mean that it's not still high enough for businesses to opt to not deal with it.